Communism (from Latincommunis – common, universal)[1][2] is a socioeconomic system structured upon the common ownership of the means of production and characterized by the absence of social classes, money,[3][4] and the state. The idea of a communist society gave rise to the Communist school of thought, also called simply "Communism", whose main elements are the social movement, political ideology, and economic theory that aim to establish this social order.

Communism as a school of thought is commonly equated to Marxism–Leninism, which became the official ideology of the Soviet Union and the Communist movement loyal to it,[5][6] although there are Communist movements which disagree with Marxism-Leninism.[citation needed]

Despite the common use of the term "Communism" to refer to the political and economic systems of countries where Communist or Marxist parties held power, no government (including that of the former Soviet Union) has ever claimed to have successfully achieved a communist society.

History

Early communism

The origins of communism are debatable, and there are various historical groups, as well as theorists, whose beliefs have been subsequently described as communist. German philosopherKarl Marx saw primitive communism as the original, hunter-gatherer state of humankind from which it arose. For Marx, only after humanity was capable of producing surplus, did private property develop. The idea of a classless society first emerged in Ancient Greece.[7]Plato in his The Republic described it as a state where people shared all their property, wives, and children: "The private and individual is altogether banished from life and things which are by nature private, such as eyes and ears and hands, have become common, and in some way see and hear and act in common, and all men express praise and feel joy and sorrow on the same occasions."[7]

Communist thought has also been traced back to the work of 16th-century English writer Thomas More. In his treatise Utopia (1516), More portrayed a society based on common ownership of property, whose rulers administered it through the application of reason. In the 17th century, communist thought surfaced again in England, where a Puritanreligious group known as the "Diggers" advocated the abolition of private ownership of land.[11]Eduard Bernstein, in his 1895 Cromwell and Communism[12] argued that several groupings in the English Civil War, especially the Diggers espoused clear communistic, agrarian ideals, and that Oliver Cromwell's attitude to these groups was at best ambivalent and often hostile.[13] Criticism of the idea of private property continued into the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century, through such thinkers as Jean Jacques Rousseau in France. Later, following the upheaval of the French Revolution, communism emerged as a political doctrine.[14]

Various social reformers in the early 19th century founded communities based on common ownership. But unlike many previous communist communities, they replaced the religious emphasis with a rational and philanthropic basis.[15] Notable among them were Robert Owen, who founded New Harmony in Indiana (1825), and Charles Fourier, whose followers organized other settlements in the United States such as Brook Farm (1841–47).[15] Later in the 19th century, Karl Marx described these social reformers as "utopian socialists" to contrast them with his program of "scientific socialism" (a term coined by Friedrich Engels). Other writers described by Marx as "utopian socialists" included Saint-Simon.

In its modern form, communism grew out of the socialist movement of 19th-century Europe. As the Industrial Revolution advanced, socialist critics blamed capitalism for the misery of the proletariat—a new class of urban factory workers who labored under often-hazardous conditions. Foremost among these critics were Marx and his associate Friedrich Engels. In 1848, Marx and Engels offered a new definition of communism and popularized the term in their famous pamphlet The Communist Manifesto.[15]

Modern communism

Countries of the world now (red) or previously (orange) having nominally Marxist-Leninist governments.

The 1917 October Revolution in Russia set the conditions for the rise to state power of Lenin's Bolsheviks, which was the first time any avowedly communist party reached that position. The revolution transferred power to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets,[16][17][18] in which the Bolsheviks had a majority. The event generated a great deal of practical and theoretical debate within the Marxist movement. Marx predicted that socialism and communism would be built upon foundations laid by the most advanced capitalist development. Russia, however, was one of the poorest countries in Europe with an enormous, largely illiterate peasantry and a minority of industrial workers. Marx had explicitly stated that Russia might be able to skip the stage of bourgeois rule.[19] Other socialists also believed that a Russian revolution could be the precursor of workers' revolutions in the West.

The moderate Mensheviks opposed Lenin's Bolshevik plan for socialist revolution before capitalism was more fully developed. The Bolsheviks' successful rise to power was based upon the slogans such as "Peace, bread, and land" which tapped the massive public desire for an end to Russian involvement in the First World War, the peasants' demand for land reform, and popular support for the Soviets.[20]

During the Russian Civil War (1918–1922), the Bolsheviks nationalized all productive property and imposed a policy named war communism, which put factories and railroads under strict government control, collected and rationed food, and introduced some bourgeois management of industry. After three years of war and the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion, Lenin declared the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, which was to give a "limited place for a limited time to capitalism." The NEP lasted until 1928, when Joseph Stalin achieved party leadership, and the introduction of the Five Year Plans spelled the end of it. Following the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks, in 1922, formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or Soviet Union, from the former Russian Empire.

Following Lenin's democratic centralism, the Leninist parties were organized on a hierarchical basis, with active cells of members as the broad base; they were made up only of elite cadres approved by higher members of the party as being reliable and completely subject to party discipline.[21] The Great Purge of 1937–1938 was Stalin's attempt to destroy any possible opposition within the Communist Party. In the Moscow Trials many old Bolsheviks who had played prominent roles during the Russian Revolution of 1917, or in Lenin's Soviet government afterwards, including Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, and Bukharin, were accused, pleaded guilty, and executed.[22]

Cold War

Its leading role in the Second World War saw the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower, with strong influence over Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. The European and Japanese empires were shattered and Communist parties played a leading role in many independence movements.

Communism was seen as a rival of and a threat to western capitalism for most of the 20th century.[24] This rivalry peaked during the Cold War, as the world's two remaining superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, polarized most of the world into two camps of nations. It supported the spread of their respective economic and political systems. As a result, the camps expanded their military capacity, stockpiled nuclear weapons, and competed in space exploration.

The People's Republic of China has reassessed many aspects of the Maoist legacy; it, along with Laos, Vietnam, and, to a lesser degree Cuba, has reduced state control of the economy in order to stimulate growth. Chinese economic reforms started in 1978 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping; since then, China has managed to bring down the poverty rate from 53% in the Mao era to just 6% in 2001.[26] The People's Republic of China runs Special Economic Zones dedicated to market-oriented enterprise, free from central government control. Several other states run by self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist parties have also attempted to implement market-based reforms, including Vietnam.

Theories within Marxism as to why communism in Central and Eastern Europe was not achieved after revolutions pointed to such elements as the pressure of external capitalist states, the relative backwardness of the societies in which the revolutions occurred, and the emergence of a bureaucratic stratum or class that arrested or diverted the transition process in its own interests. Marxist critics of the Soviet Union, most notably Trotsky, referred to the Soviet system, along with other states ran by Marxist-Leninist parties, as "degenerated" or "deformed workers' states", arguing that the Soviet system fell far short of Marx's communist ideal and he claimed the working class was politically dispossessed. The ruling stratum of the Soviet Union was, by Trotskyism, held to be a bureaucratic caste, but not a new ruling class, despite their political control.

Marxism, first developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, has been the foremost ideology of the communist movement. Marxism considers itself to be the embodiment of scientific socialism; rather than model an "ideal society" based on intellectuals' design, it is a non-idealist attempt at the understanding of society and history, through an analysis based in real life. Marxism does not see communism as a "state of affairs" to be established, but rather as the expression of a real movement, with parameters which are derived completely from real life and not based on any intelligent design.[27] Marxism, therefore, does no blueprinting of a communist society; it only makes an analysis which concludes what will trigger its implementation, and discovers its fundamental characteristics based on the derivation of real life conditions.

At the root of Marxism is the materialist conception of history, known as historical materialism for short. It holds that the key characteristic of economic systems through history has been the mode of production, and that the change between modes of production has been triggered by class struggle. According to this analysis, the Industrial Revolution ushered the world into a new mode of production: capitalism. Before capitalism, certain working classes had ownership of instruments utilized in production. But because machinery was much more efficient, this property became worthless, and the mass majority of workers could only survive by selling their labor, working through making use of someone else's machinery, and therefore making someone else profit. Thus with capitalism, the world was divided between two major classes: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.[28] These classes are directly antagonistic: the bourgeoisie has private ownership of the means of production and earns a profit off surplus value, which is generated by the proletariat, which has no ownership of the means of production and therefore no option but to sell its labor to the bourgeoisie.

Historical materialism goes on and says: the rising bourgeoisie within feudalism, through the furtherance of its own material interests, captured power and abolished, of all relations of private property, only the feudal privileges, and with this took out of existence the feudal ruling class. This was another of the keys behind the consolidation of capitalism as the new mode of production, which is the final expression of class and property relations, and also has led into a massive expansion of production. It is, therefore, only in capitalism that private property in itself can be abolished.[29] The proletariat, similarly, will capture political power, abolish bourgeois property through the common ownership of the means of production, therefore abolishing the bourgeoisie, and ultimately abolishing the proletariat itself, and ushering the world into a new mode of production: communism. In between capitalism and communism there is the dictatorship of the proletariat, a democratic state where the whole of the public authority is elected and recallable under the basis of universal suffrage;[30] it is the defeat of the bourgeois state, but not yet of the capitalist mode of production, and at the same time the only element which places into the realm of possibility moving on from this mode of production.

An important concept in Marxism is socialization vs. nationalization. Nationalization is merely state ownership of property, whereas socialization is actual control and management of property by society. Marxism considers socialization its goal, and considers nationalization a tactical issue, with state ownership still being in the realm of the capitalist mode of production. In the words of Engels: "the transformation [...] into State-ownership does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. [...] State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution".[31] This has led some Marxist groups and tendencies to label states such as the Soviet Union, based on nationalization, as state capitalist.[32]

Leninism

"We want to achieve a new and better order of society: in this new and better society there must be neither rich nor poor; all will have to work. Not a handful of rich people, but all the working people must enjoy the fruits of their common labour. Machines and other improvements must serve to ease the work of all and not to enable a few to grow rich at the expense of millions and tens of millions of people. This new and better society is called socialist society. The teachings about this society are called 'socialism'."-Vladimir Lenin, "To the Rural Poor" (1903); Collected Works, Vol 6, p. 366

Leninism is the revolutionary theories developed by Vladimir Lenin, including the organizational principles of democratic centralism, Vanguardism and the political theory of imperialism. Leninist theory postulates that, with the strongly determined will of the Bourgeoisie to establish Imperialism, socialism will not arise spontaneously through the natural decay of capitalism, and that workers by themselves, who may be more or less sedated by reactionary propaganda, are unable to effectively organize and develop socialist consciousness, therefore requiring the leadership of a revolutionary vanguard organized on the basis of democratic centralism. As a result, Leninism promotes a Vanguard party in order to lead the working-class and peasants in a revolution.

Although the creation of a vanguard party was outlined by Marx and Engels in Chapter II: "Proletarians and Communists" of The Communist Manifesto[citation needed], Lenin modified this position by changing the role of the vanguards to professional revolutionaries, who were to hold power post-revolution and direct the national economy and society in developing world socialism.

After disposing of the Bourgeois dictatorship through socialist revolution, Leninists seek to create a socialist state in which the working class would be in power, which they see as being essential for laying the foundations for a transitional withering of the state towards communism (Stateless society). In this state, the vanguard party would act as a central nucleus in the organization of socialist society, presiding over a single-party political system. Leninism rejects political pluralism, seeing it as divisive and destructive. Instead, Leninism advocates the concept of democratic centralism as a process to ensure the voicing of concern and disagreement and to refine policy. Generally, the purpose of democratic centralism is "diversity in ideas, unity in action."

Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism and Trotskyism

Marxism-Leninism and Stalinism

Marxism–Leninism is a political ideology developed by Stalin,[5] which according to its proponents is based in Marxism and Leninism. The term describes the specific political ideology which Stalin implemented in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and, in a global scale, in the Comintern. There is no definite agreement between historians of about whether Stalin actually followed the principles of Marx and Lenin.[33] It also contains aspects which, according to some, are deviations from Marxism, such as "socialism in one country".[34][35] Marxism–Leninism was the ideology of the most clearly visible communist movement. As such, it is the most prominent ideology associated with communism.

Marxism-Leninism refers to the socioeconomic system and political ideology implemented by Stalin in the Soviet Union and later copied by other states based on the Soviet model (central planning, single-party state, etc.), whereas Stalinism refers to Stalin's style of governance (political repression, cult of personality, etc.); Marxism-Leninism stayed after de-Stalinization, Stalinism did not. However, the term "Stalinism" is sometimes used to refer to Marxism-Leninism, sometimes to avoid implying Marxism-Leninism is related to Marxism and Leninism.

Maoism is a form of Marxism-Leninism associated with Chinese leader Mao Zedong. After de-Stalinization, Marxism-Leninism was kept in the Soviet Union but certain anti-revisionist tendencies, such as Hoxhaism and Maoism, argued that it was deviated from. Therefore, different policies were applied in Albania and China, which became more distanced from the Soviet Union.

Marxism-Leninism has been criticized by other communist and Marxist tendencies. They argue that Marxist-Leninist states did not establish socialism but rather state capitalism.[32] The dictatorship of the proletariat, according to Marxism, represents the rule of the majority (democracy) rather than of one party, to the extent that co-founder of Marxism Friedrich Engels described its "specific form" as the democratic republic.[36] Additionally, according to Engels, state property by itself is private property of capitalist nature[37] unless the proletariat has control of political power, in which case it forms public property.[38] Whether the proletariat was actually in control of the Marxist-Leninist states is a matter of debate between Marxism-Leninism and other communist tendencies. To these tendencies, Marxism–Leninism is neither Marxism nor Leninism nor the union of both, but rather an artificial term created to justify Stalin's ideological distortion,[39] forced into the CPSU and Comintern. In the Soviet Union, this struggle against Marxism–Leninism was represented by Trotskyism, which describes itself as a Marxist and Leninist tendency.

Trotsky and his supporters, struggling against Stalin for power in the Soviet Union, organized into the Left Opposition and their platform became known as Trotskyism. Stalin eventually succeeded in gaining control of the Soviet regime and Trotskyist attempts to remove Stalin from power resulted in Trotsky's exile from the Soviet Union in 1929. Trotsky later founded the Fourth International, a Trotskyist rival to the Comintern, in 1938.

Trotsky's politics differed sharply from those of Stalin and Mao, most importantly in declaring the need for an international proletarian revolution (rather than socialism in one country) and unwavering support for a true dictatorship of the proletariat based on democratic principles.

The central argument of council communism, in contrast to those of social democracy and Leninist communism, is that democratic workers' councils arising in the factories and municipalities are the natural form of working class organization and governmental power. This view is opposed to both the reformist and the Leninist ideologies, with their stress on, respectively, parliaments and institutional government (i.e., by applying social reforms, on the one hand, and vanguard parties and participative democratic centralism on the other).

The core principle of council communism is that the government and the economy should be managed by workers' councils composed of delegates elected at workplaces and recallable at any moment. As such, council communists oppose state-runauthoritarian "State socialism"/"State capitalism". They also oppose the idea of a "revolutionary party", since council communists believe that a revolution led by a party will necessarily produce a party dictatorship. Council communists support a worker's democracy, which they want to produce through a federation of workers' councils.

Left communism

Left communism is the range of communist viewpoints held by the communist left,[clarification needed] which criticizes the political ideas of the Bolsheviks at certain periods, from a position that is asserted to be more authentically Marxist and proletarian than the views of Leninism held by the Communist International after its first and during its second congress.

Left communists see themselves to the left of Leninists (whom they tend to see as 'left of capital', not socialists), anarchist communists (some of whom they consider internationalist socialists) as well as some other revolutionary socialist tendencies (for example De Leonists, who they tend to see as being internationalist socialists only in limited instances).[citation needed]

Anarcho-communism differs from Marxism rejecting its view about the need for a State Socialism phase before building communism. The main anarcho-communist theorist Peter Kropotkin argued "that a revolutionary society should "transform itself immediately into a communist society,", that is, should go immediately into what Marx had regarded as the "more advanced," completed, phase of communism."[52] In this way it tries to avoid the reappearance of "class divisions and the need for a state to oversee everything".[52]

Some forms of anarchist communism such as insurrectionary anarchism are egoist and strongly influenced by radical individualism,[53][54][55] believing that anarchist communism does not require a communitarian nature at all. Most anarcho-communists view anarcho-communism as a way of reconciling the opposition between the individual and society.[56][57][58]

42And they continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and in fellowship ...44And all that believed were together, and had all things in common;45And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.

Christian communism can be seen as a radical form of Christian socialism. Also, because many Christian communists have formed independent stateless communes in the past, there is a link between Christian communism and Christian anarchism. Christian communists may not agree with various parts of Marxism, but they share some political goals of Marxists, for example replacing capitalism with socialism, which should in turn be followed by communism at a later point in the future. However, Christian communists sometimes disagree with Marxists (and particularly with Leninists) on the way a socialist or communist society should be organized.

Criticism of communism can be divided into two broad categories: those concerning themselves with the practical aspects of 20th century Communist states, and those concerning themselves with communist principles and theory.

The categories of criticisms mentioned above are discussed in separate articles:

References

^Principles of Communism, Frederick Engels, 1847, Section 18. "Finally, when all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands of the nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, and production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain."

^History for the IB Diploma: Communism in Crisis 1976–89. Allan Todd. Page 16. "Essentially, Marxism–Leninism was the 'official' ideology of the Soviet state" and all communist parties loyal to Stalin and his successors - up to 1976 and beyond."

^Marx, Karl. The German Ideology. 1845. Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook. A. Idealism and Materialism. "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."

^Engels, Friedrich. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Chapter 3. "But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution."

^North Korea Under Communism: Report of an Envoy to Paradise. Cornell Erik. Page 169. "Socialism in one country, a slogan that aroused protests as not only it implied a major deviation from Marxist internationalism, but was also strictly speaking incompatible with the basic tenets of Marxism".

^A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891. Marx & Engels Collected Works Volume 27, p. 217. "If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat"

^"Socialism: Utopian and Scientific". Friedrich Engels. Part III. Progress Publishers. "But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces."

^"Socialism: Utopian and Scientific". Friedrich Engels. Part III. Progress Publishers. "The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialized means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means of production from the character of capital they have thus far borne, and gives their socialized character complete freedom to work itself out"

^History for the IB Diploma: Communism in Crisis 1976-89. Allan Todd. Page 16. "The term Marxism-Leninism, invented by Stalin, was not used until after Lenin's death in 1924. It soon came to be used in Stalin's Soviet Union to refer to what he described as 'orthodox Marxism'. This increasingly came to mean what Stalin himself had to say about political and economic issues." [...] "However, many Marxists (even members of the Communist Party itself) believed that Stalin's ideas and practices (such as socialism in one country and the purges) were almost total distortions of what Marx and Lenin had said".

^"Communism is the one which guarantees the greatest amount of individual liberty—provided that the idea that begets the community be Liberty, Anarchy ... Communism guarantees economic freedom better than any other form of association, because it can guarantee wellbeing, even luxury, in return for a few hours of work instead of a day's work." Kropotkin, Peter. "Communism and Anarchy".Archived 29 July 2011 at WebCite

^"I see the dichotomies made between individualism and communism, individual revolt and class struggle, the struggle against human exploitation and the exploitation of nature as false dichotomies and feel that those who accept them are impoverishing their own critique and struggle. "MY PERSPECTIVES - Willful Disobedience Vol. 2, No. 12".Archived 29 July 2011 at WebCite

^Bellamy, Richard (2003). The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought. Cambridge University Press. p. 60. ISBN978-0-521-56354-3.

^Self, Peter. Socialism. A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, editors Goodin, Robert E. and Pettit, Philip. Blackwell Publishing, 1995, p. 339 "Extreme equality overlooks the diversity of individual talents, tastes and needs, and save in a utopian society of unselfish individuals would entail strong coercion; but even short of this goal, there is the problem of giving reasonable recognition to different individual needs, tastes (for work or leisure) and talents. It is true therefore that beyond some point the pursuit of equality runs into controversial or contradictory criteria of need or merit."

Bibliography

Holmes, Leslie (2009). Communism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-955154-5.